


Three Little Wolves

by vyatka



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Angst, Family Dynamics, Gen, Motherhood, thanks to the anon who told me how to tag for helena's sons!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-05
Updated: 2019-02-05
Packaged: 2019-10-22 13:43:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17663753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vyatka/pseuds/vyatka
Summary: It has been years since Helena last killed anything, and she still cannot pick up a knife without living for a moment in a tumult of blood and sweat.





	Three Little Wolves

Helena's son bares his little milk teeth. " _Rarr_ ," he says, and adds a little bit of a snarl in his throat to go with it. Whenever Helena reads him  _Red Riding Hood,_ she makes wolf noises, and he makes them almost as well as her. 

Helena bares her teeth back. " _Raarrrrrr_ ," she says, and shakes her head like she's tearing gristle from a deer's breastbone. 

" _RAAAAARRRRRRRR,"_ he shouts, outdoing her, and Helena giggles. 

"You are so loud, my little wolf," she says, and moves him off of her so she can sit up. "Where is your brother?" 

"Aunt Sarah," he says, and barks. 

Helena barks in return. "Why are you not with them?" 

"I wanted an apple," he says. "I asked Aunt Cosima, but she just took one out of the 'frigerator and gave me it." 

"She did not cut it for you?" 

"No." He pushes his soggy sleeves up his arms. "I tried to eat it with my wolf teeth, but it was too hard." 

"Silly Aunt Cosima," says Helena, taking his little hand. His itty-bitty nails are painted purple. Only Alison would have done that. Helena smiles. "Let's go and cut it, yes?" 

They walk to the kitchen where, true to Little Arthur's tale, there are tiny teeth dents in the apple's skin. Helena picks up a knife and holds it. She turns it over and over in her palm. It has been years since Helena last killed anything, and she still cannot pick up a knife without living for a moment in a tumult of blood and sweat. She switches her grip around. Whatever became of her fish knife, she doesn't know, but for a moment, she wonders. 

She cuts the apple into small chunks and hands them to him one at a a time. He mashes them against his lips and holds his hair out of his face with his other hand. Helena's never cut it, and it's down to his elbows, and dark like hers used to be, before the bleach. Alison started to purse her lips at it when it got past his shoulders. Helena isn't going to cut it until and unless he asks. 

They go outside into the June sun, Helena still cutting up the apple, chunk by chunk. Big Arthur and Sarah have Little Donnie between them. Big Donnie is gone. He and Alison are away. Cosima and her doctor-wife are curled over each other in a lawn chair. 

Little Donnie catches sight of them and scrambles out of Sarah's laps. Big Arthur waves, and so does Sarah. Helena waves back. 

 ***

Helena speaks Ukrainian to her children as much as English, partially because she knows it infuriates the ghosts of Tomas and Henrik Johanssen. Tomas never liked it when she spoke Ukrainian. Henrik allowed it, but he was brittle about it. He thought it was low. Unclean. He never said it. His eyes said it for him, the creases at the corners when she dared speak her own tongue. She speaks to them in Ukrainian out of spite and out of love, and she is glad. As added benefit, they have the option of telling her secrets when they are in public, such as how the lady behind them kept picking her nose even though that was bad behavior, and wasn't that funny? 

Helena agreed. 

Now they are walking through the city, Helena in the middle, a boy on each side, on their way to where Helena goes to school, which is not really a school at all but a program run out of a church for mothers who are looking to achieve their high school equivalency. It meets three times a week. 

Helena's education ended when she was ten, because ten at the convent was deemed old enough to spend time taking care of the younger children instead. Tomas and Maggie taught her the mathematics of sniping, later, but that was not an education. 

That is her schooling - five years of workbooks and Bible verses, and lessons in angling a gun. Helena has swaths of un-knowledge that she is determined to fill. History and literature, science. There is so much that she does not  _know._

"I want to go to university," she said shyly to Sarah, one night six months ago, watching Little Donnie's chest rise and fall in sleep. She nibbled her sleeve and didn't look over to see Sarah's face, undoubtedly eyebrows up and skeptical. She couldn't bear it. Her foot, resting on her knee, bounced. When she finally looked over, Sarah nodded.

"Start with high school, eh, meathead?" she said, and the knot in Helena's chest loosened. 

Through Alison, she found the classes, and although Helena has no shortage of childcare, she chose to bring her sons with her. Their small hands in hers give her strength. The way knives did. Once. 

 ***

"You've gotta tell 'em someday, Helena," Sarah says quietly. "Look - they're already gettin' old enough to ask questions." 

Her scars, she meant. No matter that she hadn't cut herself in years; her wings were lifelong, seared into her flesh forever. Most time she managed to hide them. The whole of her back and shoulders is a great deal to hide, however, and the outermost feathers reach around to her ribs and up to the base of her yellow hair. Little Donnie recently pointed out that  _Mama's shoulders have lines but Aunt Sarah's doesn't,_ and it made Helena's heart pound. 

"I know," she says, mouth against her knees. 

"Kids are smart." 

"I  _know,_ " she bites. Then - "sorry, сестра." 

Sarah reaches out and rubs Helena's back. Helena melts like butter in a saucepan. (Her distress remains a little, insoluble rock.) Sarah is  _touching_ her, though, and Helena presses against her hand and closes her eyes, sighing. "Start workin' out what you're gonna tell the boys," Sarah continues. "You're gonna have to tell them something." 

Tell them what? That Helena was a weapon and an angel, a dog and a killer? She struck down her sisters and carved wings into her back? She has been drowned and burned and eaten. She is a wolf and a woman and she is mortal and celestial, and how to explain that to children whose concept of death was so far removed from their lives that it meant nothing, and whose concept of pain was skinned knees and stubbed toes? 

How to explain orphanhood to a child who has been rocked to sleep every night of their life. 

Helena swipes at her eyes. 

The next day, she writes a letter in spidery Ukrainian and tucks it inside of  _Orphan Black,_ and kisses it. 

 _MY LITTLE WOLVES,_ the letter begins. 

**Author's Note:**

> I love to Think. About Helena and motherhood. 
> 
> Please comment/kudos if you enjoyed! 
> 
> I'm also on [Tumblr](http://soldatka.tumblr.com/).


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